He is facing up to 60 years in jail after he admitted hacking into email addresses belonging to more than 50 celebrities and stealing personal data – including nude photos of Johansson – and now he’s spoken out to reveal how simple it was to access the accounts.

Chaney insists once he broke into one unnamed star’s account – using details freely available on the internet – he searched her inbox and found emails from dozens of other famous faces, enabling him to add them to his list of targets.

He tells GQ magazine, “You feel like you’ve seen something that the rest of the world wanted to see. But you’re the only one that’s seen it. It’s the whole ‘Star Trek’ thing – going where no man has gone before.”

Chaney admits he was first tempted to try out email hacking after reading how Miley Cyrus was targeted by cyber-crooks in 2008, adding, “I was like, ‘How hard could this be if it’s happening all the time?’”